1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a mobile device and particularly to a solution wherein locations of branches of a user's preferred stores/businesses are displayed on a map presented to a user while the user is driving/navigating.
2. Related Art
Mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous. Children carry them and so do adults. Most people working in customer facing industries use mobile phones to stay in touch with their customers and take phone calls throughout the day. Unfortunately, different workflows for such people are barely supported on their mobile phones and thus their mobile phone is not used effectively to support their business needs. In particular, the techniques real estate agents currently use are antiquated and largely ineffective, especially as it relates to the creation and sharing of property evaluation information. A typical scenario involves assigning a property to an agent who makes himself familiar with the property. The agent visits the property, collects facts, and takes notes. Such notes are sometimes referred to as evaluation. Then that agent is assigned a buyer. The agent has at least a working knowledge of a particular area of the market. During an initial consultation, the buyer gives the agent an idea of property he or she would like to buy or rent and a general idea of where that property should be located. Based on this information, the agent searches the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) database to locate properties that are currently available. A second meeting is then set up with the buyer for the purpose of visiting those properties.
Sometimes, a given property has more than one agent assigned to it. Each agent visits the property and collects facts and takes notes. They each maintain their notes and are often incapable of sharing their notes. Thus there is a duplication of effort, and often one agent may have a certain perspective that another agent may not have, and may benefit from. However, with no capabilities to easily and effectively share such evaluations, agents seem to work within the confines of the information they are personally able to collect and process.
Various real-estate companies sometimes assign their own agents to sell or buy a property on sale. In this scenario, several different agents, from one or more real-estate companies, visit the same property, evaluate the property, take notes and try to use it for their sales efforts. They could benefit from sharing their evaluations but there is currently no easy, effective, structured way to share their evaluations. If there are inconsistencies in their evaluations, they are not able to discover such inconsistencies in time and resolve them easily. If there are some issues of ownership known to one agent, it cannot currently be shared in a timely manner with another agent, and quite often, such vital information is unavailable to others interested in that property.
Home buyers and real-estate agents often use paper maps and locate MLS listing entries on the map, and drive around with the maps to visit and evaluate properties that have come to the market. They take down notes in their notebooks and keep their notebooks handy to be able to refer to them. Such methods have proven to be time-consuming, cumbersome, and generally inefficient. In particular, information not currently known to a real-estate agent regarding a problem with the property or its ownership that is known to some other real-estate agent, is not only unavailable, but also likely to remain so.
Another drawback of current techniques relates to the need by a real-estate agent to physically visit properties within the market to evaluate them. Once the agent knows the general area of interest to the buyer, he usually visits the location to evaluate it, before escorting the buyer to each of the properties. Thus, such visits for evaluations delay the sales process, even when some other agent might already have evaluated it previously, due to the lack of mechanisms to share evaluations across agents and for other related reasons.
In view of the foregoing considerations, it is clear that there is a need for an improved system and method for creating and sharing property evaluation information that can be used by real-estate agents in assisting their customer needs.